ISC HPC Blog

The UberCloud Earns 2013 HPCwire Readers Choice Award

Posted: 12-18-2013 09:00

At the Supercomputing Conference and Exhibition in Denver last month, the UberCloud HPC Experiment received the 2013 HPCwire Readers Choice Award for the “Best Cloud Implementation.” The UberCloud, which was featured at this year’s International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) in Leipzig and ISC Cloud in Heidelberg, was founded in mid-2012 to provide a platform for engineers and scientists to explore using cloud computing for their HPC workloads, as well as to study and resolve the major roadblocks. So far, over 700 organizations from 60 countries joined UberCloud, and more than 120 teams have been built around applications from small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs).

The benefits for SMEs and research organizations of using high performance computing (HPC) in their design and development processes can be huge. Saving costs, reducing product failures, optimizing processes, achieving higher quality products, and shortening the time to market can all be achieved by incorporating HPC into the workflow. All this leads to increased competitiveness and more innovation.

HPC as a service in the cloud is evolving as a new paradigm for engineering and scientific simulations, in addition to the use of powerful workstations and HPC servers. However, workstations are often not fast enough and provide limited capacity, and HPC servers can be quite expensive. On the other hand, HPC as a cloud service offers great benefits, especially for SMEs and small research organizations.

In addition to using their own desktop systems for daily design and development work, HPC in the cloud enables engineers and scientists to run larger, more complex, and time-consuming jobs. Benefits of cloud-based HPC include having access to “infinite” resources on demand, being able to pay per use, reducing capital expenditures, having greater business agility, enabling higher-quality results, lowering risk by reducing product failure rates, and being able to dynamically scale resources up and down as needed.

One reason for the HPCwire readers to vote for the UberCloud was obviously the Intel sponsored Compendium of 25 of the best case studies which has been and downloaded almost 1000 times in the last few months. There is clearly a need to better understand HPC cloud benefits and roadblocks, and the UberCloud helps our community by providing the community website, the experiment platform, the exhibition, the university, and the marketplace for HPC as a service, in the cloud.

The UberCloud recently released its community website and marketplace ready for the wider engineering and scientific community to try out and purchase HPC resources, software, and expertise services. The website provides deeper insight into the different teams, a forum to interact with a specific team, and a platform for building your own experiment team. Information about different resources, software, and expertise providers is also furnished. The site also includes the latest feature stories from online media in HPC and digital manufacturing and a mechanism for requesting quotes from cloud resource providers. In addition, the UberCloud Exhibition offers virtual exhibit space to service providers offering cloud resources, software, and expertise, with currently more than 30 service providers exhibiting, among them Autodesk and Bull, together with Intel, the main sponsors of the UberCloud.

Last but not least, the UberCloud will again be featured at next year’s ISC Conference in Leipzig, June 23 – 26, and at the ISC Cloud Conference in Heidelberg, September 29 – 30.